The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  I caught her eye. “I’m not Shiloh’s fidanzata anymore. We’re married.” She looked at me with incomprehension. I held up my hand, showing her the ring. “Married. See?”

  Understanding dawned and she smiled. “That’s lovely,” she said. Her accent made it thatsa lovely, the speech of a B-movie Italian widow. She poured the coffee and we settled at her kitchen table.

  “How’s Snoopy?” I asked.

  “Snoopy?” she repeated. She nodded toward the back door, near which I saw gray-muzzled Snoopy sleeping near her empty food bowl. “Snoopy is-a…” she considered, “old. Like me.” She laughed at herself, her eyes flashing.

  Unexpectedly I saw a young girl six decades ago in Sicily, with dark eyes and a ready laugh and a strong body. I’d never seen her before in this widow’s stooped form and that made me ashamed of myself.

  “Listen, Mrs. Muzio,” I said. “I need to talk to you. My husband, you know, Mike?” I paused.

  “Mike?” she said.

  “Right.” I nodded affirmatively. “Have you seen him recently?”

  “He fixed the gate,” she said.

  “That was months ago,” I said. “Just this week, have you seen Mike? When was the last time you saw Mike?” I kept trying to hit the key words hard.

  “I see him walking down the street,” she said.

  “What day?”

  She squinted like she was making out Shiloh’s form. “Yesterday?” she suggested.

  “I don’t think it was yesterday,” I said. “Can you think of something else that happened on the same day that would narrow it down?”

  “The governor was talking on the radio.”

  “About what?”

  She shook her head. “He was talking on the radio. He sounded angry.”

  “That was the same day you saw Mike walking?” I asked.

  “Yes. Mike is walking in the street. He looks angry. Very serious face.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Have you seen anything strange lately? Especially around our house?” I knew I could be opening a Pandora’s box, remembering the omnipresent “rascals,” but Mrs. Muzio shook her head. If her memory was a bit fuzzy, she wasn’t paranoid today.

  I stayed another ten minutes to be polite, talking, winding the conversation back to neighborhood goings-on in hopes of jarring loose anything else that might help, but I learned nothing. I stood and set my empty coffee cup in the sink.

  “You are leaving now?” she asked me.

  “When Mike comes back we’ll drop by for a visit,” I promised.

  Outside, a cool wind had picked up, rattling the dry-leaved branches.

  Mrs. Muzio thought she had last seen Shiloh out walking and looking “angry.” That was, by her account, the same day that she’d heard the governor talking on the radio and sounding “angry.” Everyone seemed to be angry in Mrs. Muzio’s world. I wondered how much faith I could put in her observations.

  Then again, Shiloh, when he was deep in thought, often had a guarded, inward expression that some people might read as anger. Maybe old Mrs. Muzio was right.

  She had said she’d seen Shiloh walking. Not out running, not in somebody’s car. That squared with my theory that he’d gone out somewhere in the neighborhood on foot and not come back.

  I’d done my hardest interview. It made sense to work from hardest to easiest. That made Darryl Hawkins next. I checked the time on my cell phone. Almost three o’clock; it was still too early. He and his wife wouldn’t be home from work until around five. I needed an errand to take up the interim time.

  I still lacked a good picture of my husband. I had only one, and I didn’t think that Shiloh knew I had it.

  Annelise Eliot had never really believed she was going to be identified and arrested after over a decade of peaceful life under an assumed name. When Shiloh finally came to her with an arrest warrant, she’d lost control. In an impulse that must have mirrored her thirteen-year-old crime, Annelise grabbed a letter opener off her desk and tried to stab him. He’d gotten a hand up in time, but she’d sliced a deep gash into his palm.

  The local media hadn’t been tipped to the arrest, but they were ready the next day for the arraignment at the US courthouse in St. Paul.

  The Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press had run virtually the same photo: Shiloh among a small cadre of uniformed cops, bringing Annelise Eliot in for her first court appearance, a courteous but controlling hand on her arm. The bandage on his hand, from where she’d cut him, was clearly visible.

  That image was the quintessential Shiloh to me, and I’d clipped it for that reason. But it wouldn’t work to show to strangers. He’d turned his face away from the photographers, so that he was in profile.

  When I got home, I picked up the phone and I dialed a number I’d come to know by heart.

  When Deborah put Genevieve on the line, I said, “It’s me. I need to ask you for a strange favor.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “Are you there?” I asked.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “At your Christmas party, Kamareia had a camera.” When the name Kamareia was hard to say, I realized I hadn’t mentioned her directly all during my visit. “She was taking a lot of photos of people, including Shiloh. I need to go to your place and get one of those pictures.”

  There was another silence, but this time Genevieve broke it without prompting. “All right.”

  “I need to know where they might be,” I added.

  “Well,” Genevieve said slowly, “there’s a shoebox she keeps on the shelf in her closet. I’ve seen a lot of photos in there.”

  “All right,” I said, “good. But your place is locked, right?”

  “Mmm, yes,” Genevieve said. “But the Evanses across the street have my spare key right now.” She seemed to think again. “I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”

  “Thanks, Gen,” I said. Then I asked: “Have you spoken to Shiloh recently?”

  “No,” she said. “Not for a long time.”

  Time and again, on the job, we’d asked loved ones for recent photos of missing persons. It was perhaps the most crucial item in a search.

  Genevieve wasn’t making the connection. She seemed to find nothing strange in the fact that I needed to go to her uninhabited, locked house in search of a recent picture of my husband.

  “See you soon,” I said, which probably wasn’t true, and hung up.

  chapter 8

  The day Genevieve’s only child died, the two of us had enjoyed a particularly good day at work, a productive day. I remember that we were both in good spirits.

  I’d given her a ride to work that morning, since her car was in the shop, and I was taking her home as well. Since I had to drive her there, Genevieve had said, I might as well stay for dinner. And Shiloh, we reasoned, might as well come with us. Shiloh had been buried in the analysis of evidence that back then nobody had believed was the trail of Annelise Eliot. He was reluctant to stop and go with us, but Genevieve and I had worn him down. Genevieve had been particularly winning in her pleas. She was worried about him and how hard he’d been working.

  It was February, one of those days in which the Cities were swaddled in a low-hanging layer of cloud that actually made for more warmth than a bright, clear day. Earlier, fresh snow had fallen, covering up the soot-stained ridges that lined the streets from the first weeks of winter onward.

  Only the last of the day’s business for Gen and me had been something of a waste of time: A missing-child report. We’d driven out to a small condominium complex in Edina to meet a young father whose six-year-old son had failed to come home on the big yellow bus.

  The young man-“Call me Tom”-was a relative rarity, a divorced father who’d gotten custody of his child. “It’s been tough,” he said, leading us inside his condo, where boxes were stacked up in the living room.

  “Did you just move here?” I asked him, but even as I did I sensed that these weren’t moving boxes; they were all uniform in size and shape.<
br />
  “Nah,” he said. “Those are juicers. I sell them, and a herbal health and diet supplement, from here at home,” he said. “And I just got my fitness-trainer credential, so I’ve been trying to build up a clientele base. Things have been pretty hectic.”

  It made sense. Tom had a compact but obviously well-built frame, and his brown gaze was intense but not personal, in the practiced way of a salesman.

  Sometimes you just get the feeling, whatever the external circumstances of a disappearance, that nothing is seriously wrong. As Genevieve and I began our interviewing, I started getting that feeling right away.

  Naturally, the ex-wife had been of most interest to us; abduction by noncustodial parents is far more common than stranger abduction. “Nah,” Tom said, shaking his head emphatically. “I already talked to Denise at work. Kinda freaked her out, but I told her to stay put for now, that I’d already called you guys.” He frowned. “She wouldn’t just up and take him, believe me. She can hardly be persuaded to spend enough time with Jordy as it is,” he said. “She’s got a new boyfriend, and besides, she’s an antiques freak. Half the time I pick Jordy up on Saturdays, he’s spent his day walking around behind her in stores, looking at Tiffany lampshades and delft tiles. Is that how you entertain a six-year-old?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, so I said, “What about other relatives?”

  “What about them? You mean, would they take Jordy?” Tom looked puzzled. “I can’t imagine it. My family’s all in Wisconsin, and Denise’s-” He broke off. “Oh, no.”

  Genevieve and I looked at each other. Eureka.

  “What is it?” Gen said, cuing him.

  “Oh, no,” he said again, reddening. I suspected the heat in his face wasn’t embarrassment but anger. “Hold on,” he said, jumping up and going to the phone.

  Tom dialed and spoke to an unknown party on the other end. It was clear within a minute that Jordy was safe and sound. “Is he there? He is?” Tom said. “I’ll come get him.”

  I looked at Genevieve and spoke quietly. “What do you think?” I asked. “Wife’s sister?”

  She shook her head. “Mother-in-law. I’d almost guarantee it.”

  We got most of the story in overheard, and increasingly vitriolic, sound bites.

  “Well, you didn’t even tell me. God, I was worried as… No, I didn’t. I said I didn’t need you to take him for a haircut. No, I did not agree, I did not… You’re twisting what I said in order to… His hair is not… That’s how they all wear… You’re not listening!”

  After a moment even unshakable Genevieve looked up at the opposite corner of the room and rubbed the side of her nose with one finger, the embarrassed way people do when they’re hearing a conversation they’d rather not. I stood up, in hopes of illustrating to Tom that Genevieve and I needed to leave, now that the situation had obviously resolved itself.

  “Look, I gotta go,” Tom said. “I’ll come get him. No, I’ll come. Just stay there.”

  He hung up and walked back to us, shaking his head darkly. “Denise’s mother,” he said. “I can’t believe it. No, I can believe it. It just kills her that I got custody. She can’t handle it.”

  He filled us in on the details: he and his mother-in-law had recently had a debate about young Jordy’s hairstyle. From this debate, she had apparently incorrectly inferred that she had permission to drive up from Burnsville, where she lived, pick Jordy up after school, and take him to the barber. “I told her no, flat out, but of course she says I said yes,” Tom said.

  I say that Tom told both Genevieve and me this story, but his behavior was interesting to observe. He’d started out by directing his comments to me. Maybe it was because I was closer to his age, maybe it was because I was more visibly the regular visitor to a gym and therefore some kind of kindred spirit, maybe it was simply my ringless finger. But as I gave no encouragement to his airing of grievances, he correctly began identifying Genevieve as the more sympathetic pair of ears, probably because she was at least nodding in the right places. Gradually his attention and eye contact shifted. It was to Genevieve that he told the backstory: a history of meddling by the former mother-in-law, unwanted advice, veiled jabs at his child-rearing skills.

  Finally, when his attention seemed solely on my partner, I drifted out of his line of sight and looked out the window at the parking lot, where a trio of warmly dressed kids were practicing free throws on one of those freestanding basketball hoops with a weighted base you can buy at sporting-goods stores. They were sure going to learn an unpleasant lesson, I thought, when they started playing on a court with a regulation-height hoop.

  “Gen, we really should go,” I said.

  But Genevieve was a soft touch. “Listen,” she told Tom kindly, “I know you wouldn’t want to press any sort of charges, but it might be good if my partner and I had a talk with your mother-in-law about the seriousness of taking someone else’s child without explicit prior permission.”

  Behind Tom’s back, I scowled at Genevieve and shook my head. Genevieve ignored me, but fortunately, her offer wasn’t accepted.

  “Nah,” Tom said, shaking his head. “It won’t help. She’ll just insist I gave her permission. She’ll even tell you that she specified that she’d do it today and that I agreed. Thanks for the offer, though.”

  I was relieved, but Tom wasn’t quite through with us yet. On our way out, he tried to sell Genevieve a home juice machine. Genevieve declined, but Tom pressed a card with his phone number on it into Gen’s hand, “in case you change your mind.”

  As soon as Genevieve started the car, I said, “What did you think you were doing back there, volunteering the two of us to drive down to Burnsville to listen to the other end of that extremely tedious family squabble?”

  Genevieve was unfazed. “It might have been interesting. Aren’t you the least bit curious about whether the grandmother was an old battle-ax, as described? What if we found her to be gracious and reasonable and entirely in the right?” She accelerated slightly to merge with the traffic on the road.

  “You mean, like the gracious, reasonable people we always deal with on the job?” I said. “Even if she was, I still don’t think driving down to Burnsville would have been the best use of the county’s time.”

  “It would have been proactive policing,” Genevieve said, adopting a pedantic tone. “Would you rather have to straighten things out again, the next time grand-mère decides to borrow Jordy again without asking?”

  I had no answer for that, and we fell silent for the rest of the trip.

  But when we were back at our desks downtown, Genevieve said, “Hey, what were you laughing about back there?”

  “At Tom’s place? I didn’t laugh,” I said. “I thought I kept a very straight face when he finally realized where his kid was.”

  Genevieve rolled a leaking pen against a piece of scratch paper and then, dissatisfied, capped it and threw it in the trash. “Not then. A couple of minutes before that, when we were in his kitchen. I looked over at you and I could see you were trying really hard not to laugh at something. I had to distract the guy so he wouldn’t see.”

  I thought. “Oh, that,” I said. “You didn’t see the sign on the refrigerator?”

  “What sign?”

  “He had a sign on his refrigerator, for those herbal weight-loss supplements, that said: ‘I lost 60 pounds. Ask me how!’ ” I was almost laughing now, remembering it. “That cheery little sign was right in my line of sight, and I couldn’t help it, I kept thinking of his kid.”

  Genevieve looked blank.

  “A six-year-old weighs about that much. I lost 60 pounds.”

  Understanding, Genevieve shook her head. “Your sympathy really bleeds sometimes. For all you knew, his son could have been picked up by a pedophile and-”

  “Bullshit. You knew as well as I did from the moment we walked into his apartment that his son was fine. For a couple of minutes,” I said, “I seriously suspected the kid was lost among all those boxes of juice m
achines in the living room.”

  Genevieve gave me her serene smile. “You’re just upset that he didn’t like you well enough to try to sell you a juice machine.”

  “Damn straight he didn’t,” I said. “And you know why? People know better than to try that shit with me. What is it with people and these home-sales things?”

  “Oh, good,” she said, “we’re off on a rant now.”

  “Well, come on,” I complained, “people actually believe the ‘get-rich-working-from-home’ ads in the back of magazines. But who do they end up trying to sell this stuff to? The people around them. Neighbors, family. I mean, is that really salesmanship? What happens when you run out of friends?”

  Genevieve gave me a look. “That would take some of us less time than others.”

  It took me a moment to realize what she was saying. Then I winced. “Gen, sometimes you are so mean to me, I swear it almost feels good.”

  She was unapologetic. “I’m just saying, the home-sales work probably gives a single father like Tom more time to be home with his son,” Genevieve said tolerantly. “Besides, it’s the American dream. Everyone wants to be their own boss.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’m happy with my lot in life: working for you.”

  “Oh, please,” Genevieve said. “I do all the heavy lifting in this partnership. Like covering up for you when you’re on the verge of cracking up in the middle of an interview situation in someone’s kitchen.” She turned away from me and typed steadily.

  I wasn’t ready to quit provoking her, though. “Genevieve?” I said.

  “Yes?” But she didn’t turn around to look at me. At least not right away. But in a moment the silence got to her and she swiveled her chair to look at me. “What?” she said.

  “I lost sixty pounds.”

  Genevieve turned away again, but too late; her shoulders were shaking. She was laughing. I’d gotten her.